Many of today's most successful Chinese entrepreneurs such as Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Tencent know that they are riding and contributing to a historic wave of economic activity. These Chinese entrepreneurs have thrived, in part, because they created companies able to change as China changed.

The world's factory is turning into an R&D machine -- and fast catching up with America. Beijing is urgently looking for ways of designing its own products rather than manufacturing someone else's. Put another way, it wants to shift from making iPhones to inventing them.